Why your diet keeps failing (and it's not your fault)
It’s been a busy couple of weeks, I spent 24 hours in Manchester, then went to Glasgow for the Commonwealth Games and am now visiting family in Essex, touring the country!
The Commonwealth Games were incredible to watch! I watched Athletics and Gymnastics and was in awe of the athletes competing, some of them were really young and this was there first Commonwealth Games, the level of dedication at such a young age is incredible! And the Women’s 10k at the athletics was won at a time faster than I can run 5k! So I definitely won’t be an athlete anytime soon!!
Deep Dive
Do you find that when you are trying to lose weight and eat healthier, you will be super focused for the first few days or weeks and then something happens and your progress stops, maybe you had a stressful day and you turned to comfort food to deal with the thing that happened.
This is so normal. Life is not perfect, no matter how much we would like it to be.
- You have a bad day at work
- You become unwell
- If you’re female, then maybe you are at the point in your cycle where you feel very hungry!
- A birthday party invite comes in
- A night out with the girls
The list of reasons why you can’t stay “on plan” is never ending, so really its not surprising that you haven’t been able to stick perfectly to the plan.
I have certainly experienced this before, especially because I have multiple autoimmune conditions all with a theme of fatigue. I would set out with a plan and complete it for a few days but then something would happen. I’d start to feel unwell and reach the point of exhaustion, then everything came crashing down. Including that “perfect” plan I set out to achieve.
This is where we need to stop making only one plan. Instead, we need to go through a more realistic goal setting process.
- We work on our big, exciting long term goals, which could be to lose 10kg
- We turn that exciting goal into a 3 month plan, maybe to lose 3kg
- Then a 1 week plan to get really clear on what we need to be doing every day this week to hit our 3 month goals, and therefore make sure we are on track for our big goals
- And then once we have those things we need to do each day, we work through different ways to achieve them, in case something comes up that means we can’t hit our plan A.
By doing this as part of our goal setting progress, it means we are thinking of our back-up plan and what we might be able to achieve on our harder days while we are in a positive headspace. This is the best time to consider the options. When you are in the middle of a hard or busy day, you are unlikely to have the headspace to think about how you could stay imperfectly on track. Instead, you will likely be thinking in a more all or nothing kind of way.
So, by using this process, when that hard day hits, you can instantly refer back to your options. This doesn’t mean your choice will be perfect every time, none of us live a perfect life and we should stop expecting that of ourselves! But it gives us more chance of making a choice that is aligned with our goals.
So, the way we should think about our goals is:
Plan A – A good day, when we feel able to stay on track
Plan B – Things are feeling a bit challenging but we want to remain focused on our goals
Plan C – A really hard day, we are making less progress but we are still making progress
Plan D – F*ck it
And our aim is to resort to Plan D as infrequently as possible, because this is the only part of the plan that is actively moving us further away from our goals.
Also, by putting this in place you are far less likely to feel like you are “off-track” as you have more ways to stay on track. Which allows us to continue to feel positive about the fact we are making steps towards our goals, whichever plan you are using to get there.
An example of what this could look like
From this you can see that what we are trying to do is acknowledge all our potential scenarios and try to give ourselves options. It would be very easy to have a morning where you needed to skip your morning walk, feel like you had failed and then the day suddenly becomes sedentary, but this is here to show us, that we can skip that walk but still make progress!
Which plan do you think you use most often? Hit reply and let me know
Favourites
Recipe
Fish finger tacos
These can be made with fillets of fish or prawns, but if like me, you always have some fish fingers in the freezer, this is a great way to elevate them
Food
Babybel
Such an under rated snack! Babybel’s are definitely not just for kids, they are a great source of protein, 2 Babybels get you 10g protein, win! Just don’t go for the Protein version of Babybel, they aren’t worth the extra money as there is so little extra protein in them.
On Social Media
From my feed
Office snacks
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Work With Me
Are you ready to remove the stress from food?
Whether you want a one-off nutrition plan or ongoing coaching, my aim is to get you to your goals without cutting out food groups or extreme diets. You don’t even have to weigh everything you eat!